At a house outside Tbilisi, Georgia, Natasha shows two cars riddled with shrapnel holes. She and her family drove from their devastated hometown of Mariupol in Ukraine to safety in Georgia, taking a dangerous route through Russia itself. 'A fragmentation bomb,' she says, gesturing to the damaged vehicles. 'A drone was flying around dropping them.'
While most Ukrainian refugees head west to escape the Russian advance, some have headed towards the invaders. Natasha and her family are among hundreds who have driven into Russia and then onto a third country, risking arrest at border crossings and dozens of checkpoints by passing into the nation that invaded their homeland. Some make the journey on their own, while others pay private drivers or rely on volunteers to ferry them through enemy territory.
Oleksandr, a sailor from Mariupol, stayed in the city for months with his wife Nadia and their two sons. They sheltered in the basement of their apartment block as the Russians pounded the city with artillery and bombs. After months underground, only about 40 of the 120 people who first went down into the shelter remained alive. They heard nothing about evacuations and received no aid. Eventually, they found a driver willing to take them to Berdyansk, a Ukrainian city occupied by the Russians, for $50 (£40) a head.
Getting there was not easy. They had to pay their driver extra to avoid checkpoints, as they had not gone through filtration—the Russian screening process for people trying to leave the area. Dmytro, who was with Oleksandr, had gone through filtration earlier. He queued at a command post for 14 hours until Russian forces interviewed him, stripped him, and checked for tattoos and marks on his shoulder. He was fingerprinted and given an official slip showing he had gone through filtration. 'The Russians told me: 'You can eat your passport, it doesn't matter. This matters,'' Dmytro says.
The driver managed to get the group safely to Berdyansk, and they continued their journey to Georgia. The BBC has spoken to people and groups who have helped to organise these escapes, but details of the routes and drivers will not be revealed to protect the safety of the refugees and those helping them.
